ABSTRACT
The leisure market is huge but at the same time, the average Japanese work year remains virtually unchanged from the mid 1970s—between 200 and 500 hours more than elsewhere in the industrialized world, and roughly on a par with Europe during the period of postwar economic recovery in the early 1950s. During the period 1975-90, hours of work for male Japanese workers in their forties rose by 40 percent, while their hours of sleep shrank by 23 percent. The general secretary of the Confederation of Japan Automobile Workers' Unions described his industry as suffering from a triple burden: exhausted and overworked workers, unprofitable enterprises, and Japan-bashing from the outside. "Volunteers," who literally work themselves to death for the corporation, are the contemporary avatars of the wartime kamikaze, having managed to internalize the same spirit of total sacrifice of self for the good of the larger collective.
